QUANTUM MECHANICS IS NOT SCIENCE

Trevor W. Marshall

Physics is where Science began....

....and most physicists continue that proud tradition.
They do so in spite of twentieth-century Physics being
rotten at the core. They persist in trying to find causal
explanations for natural phenomena, yet the overarching
theory of twentieth-century Physics, known as Quantum
Mechanics (I shall call it QM), not only claims
that causal explanations are
a delusion, but also trains our cleverest young brains
to produce magical explanations a witch
doctor would be
proud of.

What is a causal explanation?

It's one which respects the direction of time. No
self-respecting biologist or psychologist would try
to tell us that something which happens today is
caused by something that is going to happen tomorrow.
Of course, if we think we can see what might happen
tomorrow we might act today in an effort to change
it, but that's a different matter.

And QM explains things differently?

The short answer is Yes. Indeed many distinguished
exponents of QM tell us that it isn't the job of
Science to explain anything at all.

So the Quantum has undermined Science?

No. The problem with QM isn't the Q; it's
the M. Its predecessor was called Classical
Mechanics, and that wasn't
causal either, because it tried to explain
the action of one object on another distant
one by means of an instantaneous force. That
was how the Sun was supposed to act on the
Earth. We call it Action at a Distance.

But I thought the alternative to QM was
a return to classical determinism....?

Well that's one alternative, but it's a pretty
poor one! Classical mechanics had already had
its day by the beginning of the nineteenth
century, when the wave theory of light
supplanted Newton's corpuscular theory. Then
Faraday and Maxwell showed that electromagnetic
interactions between charged bodies were carried
by a physical field, and finally, in 1915, Einstein
showed that gravity also propagates, as a
physical field, from the Sun to the Earth.

So causality means fields?

Yes, and also, as Einstein insisted in a famous
article in 1948 (see also the EPR
article of 1935 and Bell's inequality
article of 1964),
that in turn requires something
called locality...

No, it didn't. The celebrated experiment of that
name was done in 1981 and was a refinement of
what Clauser and Freedman did in 1972.
Neither
of them established that locality is violated.
If you think about it, it's just as well they
didn't. Because if two "photons" with a common
origin were really joined by an umbilical
chord, so that an observation of one of them
produced a physical change in the other, then
you would have to start believing all sorts of
other telepathic and psychokinetic mumbo-jumbo.

Surely you aren't suggesting....?

That Aspect, Clauser, Freedman etc believe in
mumbo-jumbo? No, I am sure they would all
emphasize the difference between the apparently
capricious microworld and our own macroworld. But
the trouble is that two light detectors 5 metres
apart look uncomfortably like a macroscopic
system. And now there are all sorts of exotic
applications of their ideas, such as
quantum
computers and
quantum cryptography,
which are being taken very seriously...

And attracting a lot of research funds?

Yes, but that's no guarantee that they'll work.
Remember how much research funds Artificial
Intelligence gobbled up. AI is a dirty word now!

So what is locality?

It's what you get when you combine rejection
of Action at a Distance with Einstein's
Relativity. It turns out that a consistently
field view of interactions means that any
field must propagate at a speed not greater than that
of light.

And don't the supporters of QM believe in
fields?

Yes, most of them. But I am afraid they have
also allowed their brains to be confused by something
called Wave-Particle Duality. Light is
continuous, but every time you make an
observation, with a photodetector, it is supposed
to collapse into a pointlike object called
a photon.

Can you have photons and locality?

It is possible to invent all kinds of
corpuscular theories, and indeed all kinds
of undulatory theories. No doubt some of them
would satisfy Einstein locality, but Science
doesn't operate like that. We can consider
only precisely formulated photon theories,
and there is no doubt at all that the
collapse involved in the QM theory of
measurement requires nonlocality.

So how do we get out of this mess?

We have to find something better. But let's
be clear what that means. As a theory of what
actually occurs in the measurement process, QM
is useless. Indeed, the only defence offered by
its supporters is that the measurement can not
be analysed by any conceivable theory. But as an
algorithm for predicting the outcome of an
enormous body of spectroscopic and scattering
experiments, QM is astoundingly successful. A better
theory would reproduce this computational
success - and at the same time restore
locality.

That sounds impossible

Well it is pretty demanding, but we just
saw that there is a historical parallel. Newton's
theory of gravitation lasted over 200years, and
was an outstanding algorithmic success. Yet it
failed Einstein's locality criterion just as
spectacularly as does QM. And, throughout those
two centuries, there were critics of Newton's
theory. Though they did not have the benefit
of Einstein's precise formulation, they knew
not only that Newton's theory would have to be
replaced, but also which feature of that theory
needed correcting. They were vindicated in 1915.

Does all that help us at all though?

Not a lot! All the evidence from the history
of Physics indicates that you won't get
anywhere in constructing a local alternative
to QM unless you already possess a fairly
formidable background in the subject. That is
a necessary, but by no means sufficient condition;
we have seen that that very same formidable
background may cause you to be blinded by your
own algorithmic cleverness. Of course, if you
search the Web a bit you'll find a fair number
of experts who will impress you both with their
formidable background and with their sincere
faith that they have found the solution,
or at least a large part of it. Actually
I am one of them, so read
some of my articles
if you would like to know more. If you don't
find me one hundred percent convincing, then
you might try confronting such other experts
as you come across with some of the above
questions.

Can we get any new science?

Well, challenging the underlying philosophy of
contemporary science, which is what I am doing,
is not necessarily the quickest way to get new
science, but it may get us to better
new science. I am myself convinced that the day
my scientific colleagues drop what I consider
the obsolete concept of the photon
their science will improve. Recently (September, 1997)
I have discovered a situation where
they expect photons to be created in pairs, one red
and one blue, whereas I expect about 1.03 red
photons for every blue one. This leads to a very
simple experimental test. Full details are in my article
The party may be over, but some are also
given on this page under
Parametric Down Conversion

A technical note

This is written for the benefit of any fellow "experts"
who may have stumbled into this page. A good proportion
of you will know that I and my colleagues have shown
that the so-called "enhancement loophole" in the
atomic-cascade experiments permits local realist
explanations of their results. This information has
been published by us in all the best journals, but has
been largely ignored.

As I indicated in my response to the last question,
progress in finding an alternative theory has been
painfully slow. Our programme is based on
Stochastic
Electrodynamics. This sets out to show that the
electromagnetic field may be described by the
unquantized Maxwell equations - in other
words there are no photons. The data which most
people accept as evidence for photons is better
interpreted as evidence for a real zeropoint, or
vacuum electromagnetic field. We have recently
been able to extend this programme to cover a
very wide range of experimental data in the
area of
Parametric Down Conversion, and have
natural explanations for a number of
otherwise incomprehensible experiments there.

The biggest challenge is in
Quantum Electrodynamics
(QED). Here we have been able to show that the current
is another stochastic field; like the electromagnetic
field it has vacuum fluctuations, and the processes of
QED, for example the Compton effect, may be understood as
the interaction of two "turbulent fields". Here I am using
the terminology of Freeman Dyson (Proc. Roy. Soc. A, 207,
395-401 (1951)). This inspired insight of Dyson owed much to
the influence of Julian Schwinger, and before him Victor
Weisskopf. All of these men clearly pictured the
electron as an extended object of size exceeding the
Compton wavelength. Their insight was unfortunately
outflanked by the technical brilliance of Richard Feynman,
who, like Paul Dirac, insisted on the pointlike electron,
and it is Feynman's ideas which continue to dominate us.
My thesis is that the terrible illness of
nonlocality is the price we have paid for
accepting pointlike photons and electrons,
and that Stochastic Electrodynamics, which is the
full maturing of Dyson's insight, will restore
locality.

For further remarks on the more general
humanist implications of my argument, see
my title page Einstein the enigma.